This is a dual-channel video installation tentatively titled "Time in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems". It is a response to practices of speculation (particularly financial, market-driven speculation) which have erupted in homelessness, unemployment, and massive redistributions of wealth. It is an attempt to consider my role as an artist, a cultural producer, as well as a speculator of sorts. Its points of departure are Martha Rosler's seminal photodocumentary 
project, "The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems" (1974-5) and Walter Benjamin's critical essay, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940). The project considers: (1) As artists, how might we map, configure, describe, and speculate intelligently about crisis -- without replicating the violence implicit in these "visionary" acts. (2) How do we visualize while making visible the limits of representation?
Spaces, Cleveland
January 2010
1. TWO identical black 19" (or larger) flatpanel monitors:
-- Monitor 1 is connected to a DVD player for a looping video/audio piece.
-- Monitor 2 is connected to a Mac with live data feed from the web (requires Firefox or Safari browser; any software required will be open-source).
2. Speakers or earphones connected to Monitor 1 for audio narrative.
The installation consists of two monitors showing disjunctive but related content. The two monitors represent a dialectical format, in reference to Rosler's photodocumentary of the Bowery in New York. This piece shifts Rosler's original focus on a location to a consideration of time.
The future has become a commodity. The ability to speculate is the ability to control, predict, measure, and wager -- or hedge. It has substantial payoffs for some, and perhaps irreversible downsides for others. The openings hard-won by cultural studies and critical theory are now being co-opted by corporations so that the act of measuring -- which enables owning, dispossessing -- becomes an act of magnanimity.
MONITOR 1 incorporates this video from a NASA-CISCO joint partnership called "Planetary Skin", launched in March 2009. Using the tagline "What We Can't Measure, We Can't Manage", the public-private initiative embodies a significant shift towards a society of control theorized by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, as well as a dystopic future mapping technology articulated by Brian Holmes.
MONITOR 1 frames a future. It is a looping video/audio piece (DVD) and therefore, not interactive.
MONITOR 2 incorporates an earlier 
video of mine called "One World, One Dream" (2008). The sequence will be extended to match the Planetary Skin narrative, specifically, the new video will animate the following transformation:
earth > death star > skin > nova > rhizome > earth > (loop)
MONITOR 2 will also visualize a live feed of stock market data or commodity price fluctuations. This will "drive" the planetary transformations.
In a sense, MONITOR 2 frames a potential past. It draws from WBenjamin's Thesis IX, where he describes Paul Klee's angelus novus, looking to the past as a pile-up of catastrophes, wings out, caught in the violent storm of progress, moving towards the future with back turned.
There are two possible installation formats depending on available space:
1. IDEAL: Monitors 1 and 2 are installed at right angles, perpendicular to each other in a corner of the room. This format "wedges" the viewer in the center of Monitor 1 (future) and Monitor 2 (past-present).
2. Monitors 1 and 2 are installed in a narrow hallway, directly opposite from each other. Again, the viewer is wedged in between 1 (future) and 2 (past-present). The viewer cannot view both at once -- not ideal, but this is preferable to the monitors simply being installed side by side, which generates no viewing tension.
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